This is a broader topic, it touches on how to deal with communication, debate, idea exchange, solution finding, society. I've seen the postures recently from supposedly right wings partisans that were mostly stuck up on old negative facts that don't apply today.
Be careful about what you dislike
121–130 of 176 posts
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Espousing nuanced opinions and making effective arguments are often at odds though. It's very easy for people to lose the thread of an argument if it is chock full of footnotes. I try to aim for "strong opinions, weakly held" - present a specific, actionable and strong position but be open to changing it if a better argument is made.
Where did you pick up the phrase "strong opinions, weakly held"?
Paul Saffo is a potential source:
> Since the mid-1980s, my mantra for this process is “strong opinions, weakly held.” Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the “strong opinion” part. Then –and this is the “weakly held” part– prove yourself wrong. Engage in creative doubt. Look for information that doesn’t fit, or indicators that pointing in an entirely different direction. Eventually your intuition will kick in and a new hypothesis will emerge out of the rubble, ready to be ruthlessly torn apart once again. You will be surprised by how quickly the sequence of faulty forecasts will deliver you to a useful result.
http://www.saffo.com/02008/07/26/strong-opinions-weakly-held...
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Espousing nuanced opinions and making effective arguments are often at odds though. It's very easy for people to lose the thread of an argument if it is chock full of footnotes. I try to aim for "strong opinions, weakly held" - present a specific, actionable and strong position but be open to changing it if a better argument is made.
Where did you pick up the phrase "strong opinions, weakly held"?
Lost to the mists of time. A little reconstructive memory spelunking via Google yields a plausible theory though:
A blog post [1] quoting a blog post [2] quoting a guy [3].
[1]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/strong-opinions-weakly-held/
[2]: http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/strong_opinio...
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#124I have realized over the years that it is wise to be naturally skeptical of any opinion that is strong, either positive or negative. People who have an appreciation for gray areas, even if they ultimately do have a preference, tend to be a lot more emotionally balanced than those who maintain a very strong stance on something. I have noticed this so consistently over the last 15 years that I now consider it a fundame…
> I now consider it a fundamental benchmark... Sorry to be pedantic, but I just wanted to point out the paradox you get by holding such an opinion so strongly.
I thought someone might say that. It is possible to have a general opinion on something, or at least some guidance, without maintaining a stubborn perspective on it. I can easily be proven wrong, when someone with strong opinions reveals to be an exception to my experience. I have no problem with that. Doesn't really happen much, though (yet).
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, that might be a slight improvement, but it's still ISDS. The fundamental problem with ISDS is not its lack of transparency, but that it allows corporations to sue governments for domestic policy changes in the first place.
Every single trade agreement has something like ISDS and the entire purpose of these courts is to make sure people follow the agreement as it was written. It's not like you will be invaded if you break the rules of the agreement and ISDS rules against you, you will simply be kicked out if you don't follow the rules. Why do morons spread fear about this shit?
Because you have elected legislators and permanent courts to apply national laws for a reason.
Bypassing democracy with pseudo-courts and pseudo-legislation and pretending it is ok is insulting to the citizens.
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#126> Then the entire thing spiraled out of control: people not only railed against TTIP but took their opposition and looked for similar contracts and found CETA. Since both are trade agreements there is naturally a lot of common ground between them. The subtleties where quickly lost. Where the initial arguments against TTIP were food standards, public services and intransparent ISDS courts many of the critics failed to…
More broadly speaking, this is a reason why it's not necessarily irrational or unreasonable to continue to believe old arguments - the effort required to claim that yes, things have changed and the old arguments are therefore invalid is so disproportionately small compared to the effort required to confirm the changes are in fact inadequate or non-existent.
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Espousing nuanced opinions and making effective arguments are often at odds though. It's very easy for people to lose the thread of an argument if it is chock full of footnotes. I try to aim for "strong opinions, weakly held" - present a specific, actionable and strong position but be open to changing it if a better argument is made.
Where did you pick up the phrase "strong opinions, weakly held"?
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need to understand something well to be justified in having a strong opinion about it. Your belief should be based on the evidence you have, even if that means a small amount that leads you to an extreme conclusion. Otherwise you will have a bias toward the median belief, and there's no reason to expect, in general, that a median belief is any better than an extreme one. The strength of your evidence should…
If you don't understand something well, then any opinion you might claim to have on it is not actually on it, but rather on what you currently understand it to be. In that case, why not just say that you simply don't know enough to have an informed opinion?
In that case, why not just say that you simply don't know enough to have an informed opinion?
Up against a dishonest debater, this is exploitable to lessen your influence, even if your position is relatively stronger, against (unsubstantiated) claims of being an expert.
"ball_of_lint claims to be uninformed and doesn't have an opinion. That's okay, listen to me, I'm an expert"
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#129I naturally see both sides of almost any argument, and my personality is such that I would rather synthesize the arguments of both sides into a final position via dialectic. I have lost almost every major argument I've had in a corporate environment.
compromise is often wise, but beware design by committee
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice it actually gives "SyntaxError: invalid syntax", but then it affects all the imported libraries so I still prefer the per-file way as a transition.
__future__ imports are per file. A few posts up you were proposing an interpreter-wide switch. Did you change your mind?
Awesome. I think both are great, first doing file-per-file and once it's working switching the global switch is a pretty good transition workflow.